Tag Archives | Muslims

Does Anti-Defamation League Leader Support Blanket Spying on American Muslims?

By on April 29, 2013 in News 0

ADL-Logo-BlueThis seems sketchy, but is he advocating blanket monitoring of America’s Muslim Community or is he simply discussing how such reactionary measures come about? The Daily Beast’s Ali Gharib feels that it is the former. Your thoughts?

The most staggering ambivalence about bigotry in Foxman’s Haaretz interview, though, wasn’t about Christians or even Palestinians; it was about American Muslims. Asked by his interviewer, Chemi Shalev, about anti-Muslim discimination, Foxman sought to rationalize it. First, he argued that incidents of anti-Semitism occur more frequently than those related to anti-Muslim bigotry, as if tracking bigotry is a game in which scores are kept. But then Foxman digs deeper.

Shalev: You don’t think that “Muslim-baiting” is much more acceptable in the mainstream media than, say, “Jew-baiting”? There is a Congressman now who is calling for the authorities to keep track of the entire Muslim community.

Foxman: I don’t think that’s Muslim-baiting. It’s a natural response.

… Read the rest

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‘Innocence Of Muslims’ Director Gives First Interview

By on November 26, 2012 in News 11

The man who kicked the hornets’ nest has granted his first interview since the furore caused by The Innocence of Muslims on YouTube. Serge F. Kovalesky and Brooke Barnes report for the New York Times:

Fuming for two months in a jail cell here, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has had plenty of time to reconsider the wisdom of making “Innocence of Muslims,” his crude YouTube movie trailer depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a bloodthirsty, philandering thug.

Does Mr. Nakoula now regret the footage? After all, it fueled deadly protests across the Islamic world and led the unlikely filmmaker to his own arrest for violating his supervised release on a fraud conviction.

Not at all. In his first public comments since his incarceration soon after the video gained international attention in September, Mr. Nakoula told The New York Times that he would go to great lengths to convey what he called “the actual truth” about Muhammad.

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Did The Republican Party’s Vilification Of Muslim Americans Just Cost It The Presidency?

By on November 7, 2012 in News 16

You reap what you sow. It seems hard to believe in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and widespread conservative hostility towards Muslims in the United States, but prior to 9/11, American Muslims were a solidly Republican voter demographic. Via Ray on the Royals, baseball blogger Rany Jazayerli pointed out yesterday that, fascinatingly, ex-Republican Muslim voters would have won the election for Mitt Romney:

In the 2000 election, approximately 70% of Muslims in America voted for Bush; among non-African-American Muslims, the ratio was over 80%. Four years later, Bush’s share of the vote among Muslims was 4%.

There is simply no way that I can justify voting for a party that denies the very legitimacy of my identity as an American. Nor can most other members of the American Muslim community, who just happen to be clustered in swing states like Ohio, Virginia, and Florida. If Nate Silver is right, not only will Romney lose the election, but it can be safely said that if the Muslim community had voted the same way they had in 2000, he would have won.

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NYPD Has Spied On Muslim Residents For Years, Hasn’t Generated A Single Terrorism Lead

By on November 2, 2012 in News 17

The Mercury News on the frustrating lack of insidious plots by the city’s residents:

In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department’s secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday.

[The NYPD had] help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames. Police hoped the Demographics Unit would serve as an early warning system for terrorism.

But in a June 28 deposition as part of a longstanding federal civil rights case, Assistant Chief Thomas Galati said none of the conversations the officers overheard ever led to a case. “Related to Demographics,” Galati testified that information that has come in “has not commenced an investigation.”

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Groups Planning Worldwide ‘Innocence Of Muslims’ Screening Tour

By on September 20, 2012 in News 38

The worst idea ever, or the best idea ever? Could the Innocence of Muslims be so awful that it’s good? The Atlantic Wire writes:

For the most part, the West has been spared the kind of turbulent protests rocking the Muslim world in recent days, but that soon could change as anti-Islam groups threaten to screen the film Innocence of Muslims in the U.S., Canada and Germany. In a strange jumble of events, the provocative idea appears to have originated from the German far-right political party Pro Deutschland, assisted by Florida pastor Terry Jones and taken up by a Canadian Hindu advocacy group, in a move that will likely test the respective countries’ commitment to freedom of speech.

On Tuesday…the Pro Deutschland party announced plans to screen the incendiary film in a Muslim neighborhood in Berlin later this year. “We plan to show the trailer of the film at a public screening in a mainly Muslim area of Berlin on the first or second weekend of November and then, in a nearby cinema or suitable venue, screen the entire movie,” said Lars Seidensticker, chairman of the party’s state faction in Berlin.

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Anti-Islam Movie ‘Innocence of Muslims’ Sparks Attack That Kills US Ambassador In Libya

By on September 12, 2012 in News 89

The Middle East is in uproar today after the US Embassy in Libya was bombed and the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, was among those killed. The attack was apparently part of a protest against an obscure film, “Innocence of Muslims,” directed by California-based Israeli Sam Bacile and allegedly financed to the tune of $5 million dollars by Jewish supporters. There’s little doubt that the film is blasphemous so far as Muslims are concerned and will likely be offensive to most non-Muslims. It also appears to be an incredibly bad piece of filmmaking based on the trailer below.

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Navy To Stop Using Image Of Muslim Woman For Target Practice

By on July 4, 2012 in News 14

Navy SEAL training apparently involves shooting at photos of hijab-clad women with Quran verses mounted behind them. All part of the plan to win hearts and minds. The Virginian-Pilot writes:

The Navy will not use a target depicting a Muslim woman holding a gun at a new training range for SEALs in Virginia Beach. The announcement came hours after the Council on American-Islamic Relations asked the Pentagon to remove the target. A picture of the cardboard target, which shows a woman in a headscarf holding a pistol, was published in The Virginian-Pilot on Tuesday. The image shows verses of the Quran hanging on the wall behind the woman.

Nihad Awad, executive director of the Washington-based council, said in the letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta dated Friday that the target “is offensive and sends a negative and counterproductive message to trainees and to the Muslim-majority nations to which they may be deployed.”

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FBI Crime Maps Now ‘Pinpoint’ Average Muslims

By on October 26, 2011 in News 6

Islamic Cultural Center Of New YorkSpencer Ackerman reports on WIRED’s Danger Room:

It started out as a crimefighting tool. But over the years, an FBI effort known as “geo-mapping” evolved into something more expansive — a method to track Muslim communities, without any suspicion of a crime being committed.

Last month, Danger Room revealed that the FBI was training its agents that religious Muslims tended to be “violent” and that Islamic charity is merely a “funding mechanism for combat.” In response, both the FBI and the Justice Department promised full reviews of their training materials. But the geo-mapping effort indicates that the FBI may have more than just a training problem: The suspicion of ordinary Muslims promoted in those lectures may be spilling over into its counterterrorism tactics.

Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union acquired some of the FBI geo-maps (.pdf), like the one pictured after the jump, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

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Add Muslim College Students to the List The NYPD Has Spied On

By on October 16, 2011 in News 7

NYPDJoe Coscarelli writes in New York Magazine’s Daily Intel:

The Associated Press’s series on NYPD spying continues today with the news that Muslim students at colleges in New York were investigated covertly by the secret NYPD and CIA program that also monitored community centers, government allies, and entire neighborhoods in the years after September 11. The new report places NYPD undercover officers at schools including Brooklyn College, Baruch, Hunter, City College, Queens College, La Guardia, and St. John’s, where they sought out student radicalization. But according to experts, their methods “may have broken a 19-year-old pact with the colleges and violated U.S. privacy laws, jeopardizing millions of dollars in federal research money and student aid.”

“The government, through the police department, is working privately to destroy the private lives of Muslim citizens,” said Moustafa Bayoumi, an English professor at Brooklyn College.

“We come to the room, we talk, we chill,” said one 20-year-old student of his Islamic Society group at school.

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In U.S., Muslims And Atheists Most Opposed To Violence

By on August 3, 2011 in News 20

lotfi_morteza20110713105003873Is violence targeting civilians ever justified in the name of a worthy cause? U.S. Christians say yes, atheists and Muslims say no. Raw Story writes:

New data from polling firm Gallup shows that out of all the religious groups in the U.S., Muslims are most likely to reject violence, followed by the non-religious atheists and agnostics.

Through interviews with 2,482 Americans, Gallup found that 78 percent of Muslims believe violence which kills civilians is never justified, whereas just 38 percent of Protestant Christians and 39 percent of Catholics agreed with that sentiment. Fifty-six percent of atheists answered similarly.

The survey was designed to measure religious and non-religious attitudes toward violence 10 years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Perhaps most tellingly, 92 percent of Muslims surveyed said they did not believe any Muslim in their community had sympathy toward al Qaeda terrorists.

When Gallup put the question a bit more pointedly, asking if it would be justified for “an individual person or a small group of persons to target and kill civilians,” the responses were a bit more uniform.

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